The mystery of the Panama Hotel lies
beneath its weathered lobby, at the bottom of 19 creaky wooden steps,
beyond a heavy glass door.

In a dimly lighted basement, belongings
of a generation are frozen in time: kimonos delicately folded in a heavy
trunk; worn suitcases adorned with stickers from Yokohama and Kobe; and a
1942 copy of the North American Times newspaper with a blaring headline,
"Evacuation of Japanese due within 10 days."

It is an accidental time capsule, this
dusty basement in Seattle's International District.

Takashi Hori, 81,
former owner of the Panama Hotel, discusses with Iowa State
Professor Marie Rose Wong some of the items in the hotel's
basement.Grant M. Haller/P-I

In random piles stacked high are
household belongings left behind 57 years ago when the United States
turned against its own citizens and shipped Japanese Americans to
internment camps like Idaho's Minidoka.

Forced from their homes in April 1942,
a few dozen Seattle families stored their possessions in this cellar,
hoping some day to return for them.

But many never did, and their electric
cookers, gallon-sized cans of Kikkoman soy sauce, homemade tempura baskets
and stone drums used for pounding cooked rice into mochi (rice cakes)
remained tucked away, out of sight and all but forgotten.

Today, the basement recalls a shameful
legacy in America's past. Yet it also offers a glimpse back to a time when
Seattle's bustling Nihonmachi, or Japantown, was a vibrant commercial hub
of fish markets, tailor shops, trading companies, banks and grocery
stores.

Seattle artist Jan Johnson saw both in
the Panama when she bought it in 1986 to save it from being torn down like
so many other hotels between Fourth and Seventh avenues.

From her artist studio across the
street, Johnson had been fascinated with the Panama, a five-story
workingman's hotel at 605 1/2 S. Main St.

With a tiled bathhouse below the hotel,
the Panama attracted thousands of immigrants who came to Seattle at the
turn of the century to work in its canneries, saw mills, railroads and
farms.

"You can see why this hotel became
so important to the community," said Marie Rose Wong, an Iowa State
University professor in Seattle to do research on hotels like the Panama.
"This was the nexus and node."

Jan Johnson holds
three tea pots found in the basement of the Panama Hotel. Johnson
plans to add a tea house to the hotel.Grant M. Haller/P-I

Johnson sensed it when she descended
down the Panama's wooden basement steps and clicked on a bare light bulb.
Where some might see clutter, Johnson saw history.

She devoted the next decade to
preserving the best of it and creating an informal museum to teach
schoolchildren.

"This is American history,"
said Johnson, whose own father, son of a Scandinavian immigrant, came to
Seattle in the 1930s. "This is what you don't learn in
textbooks."

Takashi Hori, former owner of the
hotel, offered to clear out the basement when he sold it to her in 1986,
but Johnson phoned museum curators instead.

From out of the clutter came a
collection of 37 trunks that went to Los Angeles as part of the
"America's Concentration Camps" exhibit, displayed at the
Japanese American National Museum.

The empty trunks and suitcases, many
stenciled with family names and addresses, continue to travel. A smaller
exhibit showed at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum earlier this year.
Next month, the exhibit opens at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum
in Atlanta.

Many artifacts
offering clues into the daily life of Seattle's Japanese
community, such as this sandal and newspaper found in the walls,
were discovered during remodeling of the Panama Hotel, located at
605 S. Main St.Grant M. Haller/P-I

What was in the trunks tells a story of
families of Japanese ancestry who were also distinctly American: a brocade
pillowcase of Mount Rainier National Park, Aqua Velva after shave, a list
of graduation requirements from Fife High School's 1938-39 school year, 16
American flags bundled in frayed brown paper and a March 17, 1916, Port of
Seattle special-election voters pamphlet.

The normalcy was shattered in December
1941 when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.

About 120,000 people of Japanese
ancestry were sent to remote internment camps in Idaho, Arizona,
California and other states. Two-thirds were U.S. citizens.

With just several days notice,
Seattle's Japanese community of about 8,000 scrambled to settle their
affairs and find storage for their belongings.

Some were forced to sell their
possessions and property for pennies on the dollar.

"Nobody knew what was going to
happen to them," remembered 81-year-old Hori, who was imprisoned at
Minidoka from 1942 to 1945. "We didn't even know whether we'd come
back here or not."

Even rumors of the evacuation in 1941
could not prepare families for the horror of what was to come, said David
Takami, the local author of a book about Japanese Americans in Seattle.

"It was a tumultuous time,"
he said. "When the order came down it was quite shocking that people
would have to leave their homes. They were able to take what they could
carry and that wasn't very much."

What they did not take with them, they
gave away, sold or left with friends or stashed in churches or private
basements.

Others went to Hori, whose family
bought the Panama hotel and building for $20,000 in 1938.

"A friend asked me to keep some
things," said Hori, a Seward Park resident who ran the Panama with
his wife for 45 years. "Word got around that I had storage space.
'Can you store some of my things?' they asked."

The Panama Hotel
attracted thousands of immigrants in Seattle at the turn of the
century.

Soon his cellar was crammed with wooden
model airplane kits and ice skates, mattresses and bed linens and books
and newspapers in Japanese and English.

Hori returned to Seattle after World
War II and reclaimed the hotel from the management company who oversaw it
for his family from 1942 to 1945.

Hori tried to contact as many families
as he could. But many never made it back to this city. Some moved to the
suburbs or out of state. Still others didn't want to be reminded

of what they lost -- by what they had
left behind.

"Who needs a broken fishing
rod?" said Ed Suguro, a 63-year-old Nisei, or second-generation
Japanese, and local community historian. "Later on it didn't mean
that much to them. As the years passed, they just forgot about it."

Suguro was 6 when his family was
incarcerated at Tule Lake, Calif. He recalled how the Panama, like many
hotels in Japantown, was "a social gathering place" for male
workers and later their families.

Designed by Seattle's first Japanese
American architect Sabro Ozasa, the Panama was home to itinerant workers
who paid about $6 a month for one of 94 single rooms. Today single rooms
cost $150 a week.

Hori's father was one of them -- an
Issei, or first generation Japanese, who worked in a logging camp and
brought his wife over in 1906.

They ran the hotel and leased out the
bathhouse, which had a separate entrance at 302 Fifth Ave.

Down in the bathhouse where customers
could also get their clothes laundered, original signs on the wall
continue to beckon bathers to "take off shoes here" or
"please put used towels here."

Though the peeling ceiling paint is
badly in need of repair, the bathhouse maintains its original blue and
white floor tiles and linoleum. Steam pipes run along the wall of two
saunas made of rough marble.

Johnson plans to keep the bathhouse the
way it had been when it closed in the 1950s.

It is thought to be one of the
country's last surviving Japanese bathhouses of that era, Wong said.

Johnson plans to change very little
about the basement.

For the past several years, she has
conducted private tours for college students and schoolchildren, hoping
that the presence of items allows people to better connect with the
meaning of Japanese internment.

Later this year, Johnson plans to open
the basement to more visitors and add a teahouse.

In one of the building's store fronts,
the tearoom will hold old photographs of Japantown before the war. Another
room would hold exhibits from the Japanese American community.

Touring the hotel on a recent morning,
the Panama's current owner excitedly pointed out her restoration efforts
to the hotel's former owner.

Hori nodded at each turn and recalled
stories about specific people and memories.

He paused before entering the basement
and said: "I appreciate her doing it. I wished the Japanese American
community had awakened to it sooner."

P-I reporter Phuong Le can be reached
at 206-448-8128 or phuongle@seattle-pi.com